


Promising to Defy Gravity

by delgaserasca



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Four times Johnny went home and one time he stayed, Gen, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:41:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28117113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delgaserasca/pseuds/delgaserasca
Summary: Dutch smiled, rueful. “I know you, Johnny Jaqobis,” she said, fond and wry. “Whatever you went looking for, you haven’t found it yet.”Johnny takes the long way home. (Post series.)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 32
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Promising to Defy Gravity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [millepertuis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/millepertuis/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide millepertuis!

**i.**

The first time Johnny came back to the Quad, everyone played their parts to perfection. Dutch tricked him into buying the Hokk, D’av challenged him to a drinking game, and Team Awesome Force rode again. They spent the whole night telling outlandish stories about the year that had passed, and in the morning, Dutch made him take her back to Lucy, so they could take on a warrant for old time’s sake.

At the end of the week, he found her in the cockpit, feet up on the controls like the two of them had never parted ways.

“You’re leaving again,” she said, before he could.

“How did you know?” Johnny had been hoping to slip away quietly, a holo message in his wake, but he’d been up all night trying to work out what he was going to say.

Dutch smiled, rueful. “I know you, Johnny Jaqobis,” she said, fond and wry. “Whatever you went looking for, you haven’t found it yet.”

And she did know him, that much was still true, but Johnny worried that maybe she didn't understand - how much it burned, knowing he had to leave; how much it could break if he tried to stay anyway. 

Johnny wasn't ready to come home, not yet.

“Hey, now,” Dutch said, getting to her feet. She reached for his face, the way she had a hundred, hundred times before. “None of that. I gave you a year,” she added, “I can give you one more.”

So, really, that’s how it began.

  
  


**ii.**

The second time— the second time was a little weird.

“What do you mean, she won't wake up?”

*

He was back in Rat City, having dropped by to see Clara and then had stayed when he'd inevitably become embroiled in more hackmod politics. He was dirty, stinking, and in need of a stiff drink, which was why, when he saw Aneela, his first instinct was to pretend he hadn't. 

It wasn't like it had never occurred to Johnny that something might cut his year short - some out-of-the-blue cry for help from Zeph or Pree, begging him back to Westerly to pull Dutch or D'av out of one mess or another. His first year out of the J, he'd almost been waiting for it, for anything that said Dutch still needed him. Now, though, now he maybe resented it, the hold that the Quad has on him, especially if it was sending green-blooded murder queens to intercept his path.

(Well, he thought, when Aneela cut off his exit - at least it wasn't Kendry.)

It wasn't the homecoming he would have preferred, but this time he already knew he wasn't going to stay. Zeph had Dutch up on the RAC cruiser, hooked up to any number of things that were supposedly keeping her alive, and except for the fact that she was unconscious, Dutch looked like she could be sleeping. She looked peaceful.

Johnny hated it.

“She's still in there,” Zeph said, pointing at a screen that showed fast-moving spikes. “You'd never see this kind of activity if she was brain dead.” She'd looked at Johnny, pegging her hopes on him. “There's nothing physically wrong with her - she just won't wake up.”

Johnny pursed his lips. “What do you need me to do?”

*

The neural link that Zeph hooked into his brain stem landed him in the middle of what looked like an outpost on Arkyn.

He found Dutch in the middle of a baying crowd. He walked up to her with open arms, grin stretching ear-to-ear, ready to call her home.

She shot him point blank in the face.

*

“Well,” said Johnny, waking violently. “That didn't go to plan.”

*

The thing about the neural link was that it was meant to give the users a way to communicate over great distances. That would be fine, except that for all Johnny welcomed open dialogue, Dutch flip-flopped between neurotic secrecy and scathingly-earnest candor. He was cool with it - every expectation was wild when you adopted a feral assassin princess and her sassy spaceship - but generally it meant the two of them do a lot of talking, and not very much communicating. There was a reason D'av had to lock them on Lucy to get them to talk to each other. They're fine with emotional intimacy, right up until they're not.

“Johnny left,” Dutch said to him, the seventh or eighth time he went under, and the first time she didn't kill him on sight. 

“And then I came back,” Johnny said. He ran a hand across his face after he woke that time around, muscles sore from tensing at the expected phaser blast. “I'll always come back.”

*

“What are you doing down there?” D'Av asked. It's been over a week since Johnny came back; two since Dutch ran headfirst into the nest of Hatchlings that resulted in her current incapacitation. 

“My best,” said Johnny. “Look, she's down there looking for something, but every time she sees me, she thinks I'm some sort of hallucination triggered by the green, and she kicks me out before I can get her to listen to me.” He resented the question. “You go in there if you think you can do better.”

“You know I can't,” D'av said. They'd tried, he and Zeph, before they'd sent Aneela out to find Johnny, but whatever it was that made him immune to the green made him a danger to Dutch. Topside, Dutch's body was weakening. There was only so much Zeph could do for her before she began to atrophy. It's like the bite she'd taken had the opposite effect to the green: instead of fortifying her, it was killing her, a slow-moving creeper encroaching on her limbic system. Introducing D'avin to the mix had only made things worse. “Anyway,” he added, slapping Johnny on the back, with more force than was necessary, “we all know you're the only one with a chance in hell of getting her out of there.” His hand felt heavy on Johnny's shoulder, adding to the weight of the responsibility Johnny had to carry. “You're the only one she listens to.”

*

The moment Johnny realized he could manipulate the dreamspace was the moment he knew he could get to Dutch. Instead of meeting her on Arkyn, he forged a memory of Lucy - their first memory together, face-to-face over the barrel of a gun. It wasn't the first time they'd met this way, and Johnny knew it wouldn't be the last, but the first time was special. “This is where I promised you,” he said, holding Dutch's eye the way he had all those years before. “This is where we began.”

Dutch looked as feverish as she had that first time, eyes wild with distrust and fear. “Johnny left,” she said, “so you can't be Johnny.”

“I told you,” he said, reaching out, palms open, “I came back. I'll always come back to you. I'm your left-hand man, remember?”

Dutch smiled, eyes damp. “Closest to my heart.”

“You know it.”

*

Dutch came to find him before he left. For a moment, he considered rewiring Lucy's security protocols, but he didn't put it past the ship to ignore him. He might be the favorite, but she was Dutch's ship first, and she still had conflicting loyalties. Instead, Johnny waits for Dutch to make her way to him, knowing she will in her own time, and not sure whether he wants her to.

“You don't trust me,” he said, after they'd traded false pleasantries. “After all this time, you don't trust me.”

“I do, Johnny,” said Dutch, coming to sit next to him, “but that doesn't mean I don't get scared.” She took his hand, pulling it into her lap to play with his fingers, even now, not quite able to look him in the eye. That's what happens, Johnny thought, when you shoot your best friend in the face twenty-or-so times. “What if what you're looking for takes you away from me for good?”

That could never happen, Johnny didn't say, no longer sure of his place. “Guess you'll have to cross that bridge when you come to it,” he said.

Dutch smiled sadly. “Why cross a bridge, when I could blow it up?”

  
  


**iii.**

After that, it took more than a year.

He came back in the meantime, because that's what he'd promised, and sometimes Dutch was around, and sometimes she and D'avin even had their shit together, but other times he missed them, or her, or he dropped in to find she'd just left the J, in search of another nest of hatchlings; another adventure without him.

“Don't the two of you call one another?” Fancy asked, watching Johnny work his way through a bottle of Hokk, two shots at a time. 

“That's not how it's supposed to work,” Johnny groused. “She's supposed to know.”

Fancy poured a shot for himself. “How?”

“What do you mean how? It's our thing,” said Johnny, taking the bottle back. “You know, our best friends forever deal. She should know.”

“Dutch is a lot of things,” Pree said later, when Johnny was well into his cups, “but psychic's not one of them.”

*

The problem was: Johnny didn't know what it was he was looking for. It had seemed clear at the time: he'd take off with Lucy, go get some stories of his own, and then he'd come home, back to Dutch, and they'd do what they always did, back-to-back. But the further Johnny went out into the black, the less he knew himself. He'd circle back to the J for a couple of days, retread old ground, and then off he'd go again, no closer to the end than he had been when he started.

*

“I love you,” she said, “but you're an idiot.”

That Dutch eventually tired of dancing, and had come to find him herself, wasn't exactly a surprise, but it wasn't like Johnny had been expecting her either. When he looked up from his drink, he wasn't sure she was real. Her hair was shorter than the last time, and she looked wan but healthy. Robust. She'd never been fragile, but sometimes, in the heat of everything she carried, Johnny could see Dutch unravelling. She wasn't like that this time.

“That's what you have to say to me,” he asked, “after all this time?”

“Well, it wouldn't have taken so long,” Dutch said, pulling the bottle from his grasp and taking a long drink, “if you'd just come home already.”

It wasn't new, this low-lying irritation Johnny felt, tired and bored with himself, but mad at Dutch, and not really sure why.

“That easy, huh?”

“It could be,” said Dutch.

*

Johnny wasn't exactly in charge of his own time, currently making credit as a courier, but when he said as much to Dutch, she just shrugged. “Nothing we haven't done before,” she said, inviting herself along.

*

It doesn't go to plan.

“These are friends of yours?” Dutch yelled, ducking behind a crate in Lucy's cargo hold as phaser fire flew over her shoulder, before popping her head over the barrier and shooting at their unexpected guests.

"'Friends' might be a generous term,” Johnny yelled back.

“No shit.”

Flying solo hadn't always meant flying smart, and Johnny had crossed a few people since he'd first left Westerly. Most of them were the usual jagoffs trying to make a quick buck off the hackmod revolt, but the rest were simple cons - thieves and weapons traders, hokk smugglers and drug dealers. It wasn't like serving the RAC. It wasn't like fighting off an armada.

The benefit of having both Dutch and Lucy was that the firefight took less time than usual. “This is what you've been doing while you've been away?” Dutch asked afterwards, coming to her feet to survey the damage. “You could do this in the Quad.”

“Yeah, well,” Johnny said, still annoyed. “You can always go back, if you're bored.”

“I think you're bored,” said Dutch. “I think you've forgotten what you came out here to do, and I let you, because I thought that's what you needed.”

“You have no idea what I need,” Johnny said, suddenly furious. Typical Dutch, always telling him what was best for him. The whole point of leaving the Quad was to find his own way, but he can't get out from under Dutch's shadow. He doesn't know when he'd started to resent that. There was a time when he'd been happy to follow her to the end of the universe and back, but following Dutch back to the J would be like quitting, and Johnny wasn't ready to do that yet. 

“You're wrong,” Dutch answered, not rising to the bait. “You need a purpose. You need to come home.” She sighed, kicking at weapons damage on the floor. “This thing with the Hatchlings, and the Hullen,” she said, “it's never-ending. It's taking me places I never could have imagined. It's taking a toll.” She looked at him then, gaze unflinching. “I need you to come home, Johnny. I need my gravity.”

“That's you,” Johnny said. “What about what I need?”

“You need to be useful,” said Dutch. “What are you doing out here, skulking around the edge of the J, trying to scrounge up your own war stories, when the war's back home?” She sighed explosively. “Dammit, Johnny. If there's a reason for all this, then fine. You can have the time. But if you're just killing time, then come home.” She softened, shoulders falling. “It's time.”

  
  


**iv.**

“Time to face facts,” Pree said, the next time Johnny swings by Westerly, “you got your feelings hurt because you thought you could leave and Dutch would follow you, and she didn't.”

“That's not what it is,” Johnny protested. “We agreed, one year. One year for me to find what I was looking for.”

“And did you?”

“No, but—”

“And to think,” Pree sighed, “you're supposed to be the smart one.”

*

“It's funny,” Zeph said, sliding into the seat opposite. “You don't _look_ happy.”

“Excuse me?”

Zeph shrugged. “I figured, you being away for so long, must be because you're happy with your life. But you're not, so why haven't you come back yet?”

*

The thing was, the second time had been weird.

There were only so many times a man could stand to be shot in the face, dream world or not, but Johnny had been prepared to go down into the link as many times as was necessary to get Dutch out. She'd been scouring her own version of Arkyn, the green in her system trying to trick her into finding The Lady, and she'd fought it ferociously. The green had sent her D'av, and Khlyen, and Aneela, and each time she'd been fooled, less than the time before, but still, taken in by the illusion for a while. Johnny doesn't remember much about it now - neural tech could be funny that way, playing with perception and memory - but the one thing he would never forget was the way Dutch sounded every time she saw him, completely convinced he was a figure of her imagination. 

_Johnny left._

Some part of Dutch had written him off. Some part of Dutch had been resigned to Johnny never coming back, and what was he meant to do with that?

That time, when Dutch let him go, Johnny had made no promises. He couldn't, not if Dutch didn't trust him. But where did that leave him, if not stranded at the ass-end of the J?

And yet, Dutch had come to find him, nonetheless. At the time he’d thought it was more of the same: she didn’t trust him, so she was going to force his hand, and then she hadn’t, and afterwards, maybe the problem had been that he’d wanted her to - had wanted someone to come in and exert some control where Johnny had clearly lost it. Had wanted someone to want him back.

“When you’re ready,” Dutch had said, but it had been a lie, and Johnny wasn’t sure if he could deal with the doublespeak. “It’s time,” she’d said, and then turned around and flown away. 

Maybe Pree was right, after all. Maybe Johnny’s feelings were hurt.

*

Dutch caught him on his way out, hailing Lucy over the comm as Johnny was about to exit the port. It was an accident: he’d overslept, then rushed to make his berth before Dutch landed. 

“Leaving so soon?”

“You know how it is, places to go, people to meet.” Johnny busied himself with Lucy’s helm controls. He paused. “I’ll be back.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Dutch said. 

  
  


**v.**

He spent the year falling in and out of scrapes. Clara called him early on, asking if he’d help her ferry hackmods from one colony to another, and he’d agreed, not having an alternative. It was messy work - it was still early days in the revolt, really, and too many folks still thought of hackmods as things and not people. Johnny had got his hands dirty, smuggling refugees out from under their so-called owners, and he’d run through a couple of months just trying to get a bead on Clara when she dropped off the radar.

“You have got to stop doing that,” Johnny said, once he’d scraped her off the floor of a mining penitentiary, and back to the relative safety that Lucy provided. “What happened to you?”

“There’s something weird going on out here,” she said. “The Companies have been turning their backs on their operations.”

“That’s nothing new, is it?” In Johnny’s experience, the Companies had a limited attention span. Unless something was threatening their profits, you couldn’t get hold of them for love nor money.

“Don’t you think it’s strange how easy it’s been to liberate mods?”

Johnny frowned. “I don’t know if I’d use the word easy.”

“The bosses are distracted,” Clara insisted. “It’s like they’re packing up to make a run for it.”

“Where would they go?” asked Johnny.

“Wrong question,” said Clara. “Why would they leave?”

*

The question stuck with Johnny over the next few runs. Clara was right: they were getting more calls from mods willing to run, and getting fewer flags on port security. Between them, Johnny and Clara liberated an entire factory of workers, and they spent the next few weeks lying low, only to find that their efforts were wasted: there’s a one-line report on the wire, and then nothing. No outrage, no reprisal.

“This is weird,” Johnny said. “It’s weird, right?”

“I don’t like it,” said Clara.

*

Out on the edge of the J were a number of mining colonies on slow-spinning moons, each one owned by a different Company, and manned by scores of indentured hackmods. News went out to the moons but rarely, if ever, came back out. 

Took a while, then, for rumors to reach Rat City.

“Word is,” said Clara, “the ranches have been going dead.” Even at a distance, folks could get word out. Most worker mods had their comms cut, but people off-planet always knew who was there and how they were faring. It could take time to hear about anything that went down, but the ranches were hardly black holes.

“Dead how?” Johnny asked. “If the bosses up and ran, we would have heard about it by now.”

“I don't know,” Clara replied, “but I'm telling you, I don't like it.”

Three weeks later, they discovered the Hatchling fleet.

*

In the end, he felt stupid for not putting it together sooner. Despite himself, Johnny calls home.

“I don’t suppose you guys know anything about a frickin’ huge invading force… do you?”

There were a couple of beats of silence before D’avin’s voice came in. “Shit.”

*

“Johnny!” Dutch said, coming into the hold. “You never write, you never call...”

For the first time in a long while, Johnny was glad to see her. He held up his hand. “Ah, but I bring the best gifts.”

“You call this a gift?” Fancy emerged from behind Dutch, gesturing back in the direction of the Hatchling fleet. “You can keep it.”

“That's the spirit.”

Dutch grinned. “Bet I can do you one better.”

* 

“Yeah, okay,” said Johnny, looking up at the emerging Hullen fleet, each ship manned by a RAC agent from the Quad, “you win.”

*

The Hatchling fleet has been encroaching on the J for years now, devouring one planet at a time. Johnny had wondered whether they'd mutate when they encountered mods - some sort of biotech evolution - but what Zeph found was worse than that.

“You don't want to know,” she said. 

“It's not a case of want,” said Dutch.

“No,” said Zeph, holding up a gloved hand covered in viscous green fluid, “you really don't want to know.”

*

If it had been as straightforward as going in and blowing things up - a Team Awesome Force special, everyone agreed - Johnny could have done it himself. But with more planets and moons in the Hatchlings' path, Clara's priorities were a little different.

“We need to evacuate, and soon,” she said. “Dunos is next, and then Perryn. Both planets have more than two thousand mod farms each - that's over 8 billion souls.” She pointed them out on the star map. “After that it's the Belt; 16 asteroid farms. Also swarming with mods.”

“If we intercept the fleet, every soul on those rocks will be safe,” said Dutch.

“Not if the bosses come back,” Johnny said, looking at Clara. “Now's the best time to get down there and get as many of them out as we can.”

He knew it was risky. To make it work, they'd have to split the Hullen fleet. The fewer ships they sent after the Hatchlings, the less firepower they had to blow shit up.

“I hope you know what you're doing,” Dutch said, on her way out.

Johnny tried to smile. “I'm definitely winging it, but hey, that's what we do best, right?”

*

They won. Of course.

*

They won, but that didn't mean there wasn't still work to do. They'd managed to evacuate most of Dunos before the Hatchlings arrived, but only a little of Perryn. There were planets up and down the strip that ran solely on mod power, all of them temporarily liberated from under the Bosses' beady eyes.

This time, when Dutch found him, Johnny was ready for her. 

“You're leaving again,” she said, the same as she had before, this time more than a little heartbroken.

“I am,” said Johnny, “but I'll be back.”

“You've said that before,” Dutch pointed out.

“And I've always meant it,” Johnny said, “but I can't cut out now. There's whole star systems out here where the Companies make money off the backs of hackmods like they're things - like they don't bleed the same as you and me.” He could hear his own voice rising, and tried to bring back a touch of civility. “I can't leave Clara here to pick up the pieces herself. She doesn't even have a ship.” He cocked a brow. “Don't suppose you can lend me one?”

Dutch scoffed. “Like you could fly a cruiser.”

“Hey!”

“Stick to something your own size,” said Dutch. “Lucy is where you belong.”

“That is—” said Johnny, the protest dying on his lips when he saw Dutch's expression, “—maybe true, sure.” They laughed, then slowed, startled by themselves into quiet contemplation.

Johnny broke the silence. “I have to do this, Dutch,” he said, “but then I'm done.”

“You'd better be,” she said, her voice unexpectedly playful. “No more excuses, Johnny Jaqobis. You’ve got a year, and then I’m coming to get you.”

*

Ten months later, Johnny docked at the ports on Westerly. When he opened the doors, Dutch was waiting.

> He promises  
>  to defy gravity and then return home.
> 
> **— W. Todd Kaneko, _Where the Sky Meets the Earth_**

**END.**

**Author's Note:**

> Title and epigraph from _Where the Sky Meets the Earth_ by W. Todd Kaneko


End file.
